Moriah | MORIAH JOVAN

The Mamba

November 11, 2016November 7, 2016Moriah

A friend wrote something on her Book of Faces, and instead of taking up all her comment space, I thought I’d put it here. I felt impressed to say a couple of words, but then it went into many words and then paragraphs. OMG I take a lot of words to say a thing.

At some point in my life’s ride, I stopped thinking, planning, wishing, and dreaming and got on the rollercoaster and went for the ride to see where it went and deal with the fallout later. I did a bizarre, outlandish thing. I wasn’t afraid because I wasn’t thinking. I was moving too fast to think anyway, too fast to second-guess myself. That thing I did got me exactly what I’d been looking for. But the rollercoaster ride was twisty and … fun. It was a grand adventure, really. That was 14 years ago.¹

Then this summer, I got on a real rollercoaster for the first time in 25 years.² I didn’t really want to. I don’t like rollercoasters. But Dude and XX Tax Deduction wanted to ride it so there I was with XY Tax Deduction who really didn’t want to ride it and after the first drop, it was wonderful. Well, I rode it a few other times and the last time I rode it, I didn’t have the lap bar down quite as tight, so I wasn’t completely pressed into my seat. And on the first hill and drop, I floated above the seat just an inch or whatever, but it was a fucking grand epiphany.³

Nobody ever told me that the secret to riding rollercoasters is to keep the lapbar just a tidge loose so you can let go and float over the hill and drop.

I have very rarely felt such an intense joy in my life as I did that moment I floated over the drop because my lapbar made it possible for me to let go and physics did the rest.

Met a guy online. Married him 6 months later. Had a kid 9 months after that. My only complaint is that we were stupid about buying a house. ↩
The Mamba at Worlds of Fun. ↩
The Zulu, now? I won’t even go into what the Zulu does to me, le sigh, but I ride it as much as I possibly can and then collapse on a bench in a glorious languor when it’s worn me out. ↩

On reading – links roundup

November 9, 2016November 7, 2016Moriah

One day I saw somebody say, “Links roundups are lame.” Well, I like them, but I have minority opinions more often than not. You know what? Fuck that. I like ’em and this is my blog.

Is ‘devouring’ books a sign of superficiality in a reader? Amongst romance readers, of course, this question is fightin’ words.

Novels particularly were associated with such habits of consumption, for they became a symbol of the newly accessible literary market. Commentators described them as feeding unwholesome appetites. In turn, certain readers were linked to novel-imbibing habits, particularly women. Describing their reading as consumption was a way of denigrating them, for it positioned them as vulnerable, ignorant and morally contagious. Gustatory metaphors often implied that women read according to the flesh, in contrast to the disembodied realm of ‘rational’ masculinity.

Countered by slow reading. These (to a fiction reader) are also fightin’ words:

But Lancelot R Fletcher, the first present-day author to popularise the term “slow reading”, argues that slow reading is not so much about unleashing the reader’s creativity, as uncovering the author’s. “My intention was to counter postmodernism, to encourage the discovery of authorial content,” the American expat explains from his holiday in the Caucasus mountains in eastern Europe. “I told my students to believe that the text was written by God – if you can’t understand something written in the text, it’s your fault, not the author’s.”

Emphasis mine. I have several opinions on this, all conflicting, except that postmodernism does tend to drive me up a wucking fall because invariably the term “intersectionality” and others like it enter the conversation. They’re rabbit trails that may or may not be as interesting as the original text.

One literature professor, Pierre Bayard, notoriously wrote a book about how readers can form valid opinions about texts they have only skimmed – or even not read at all. “It’s possible to have a passionate conversation about a book that one has not read, including, perhaps especially, with someone else who has not read it,” he says in How to Talk About Books that You Haven’t Read (2007), before suggesting that such bluffing is even “at the heart of a creative process”.

See: Born Yesterday. No, seriously, I’m telling you to see the movie. It’s not Great Art (nominated for a Raspberry)¹, but there’s a pivotal scene with Nora Dunn’s character that is the thematic heart of the whole movie, when she’s surprised that Melanie Griffith’s character read the entirety of Democracy in America. She tells her that nobody ever reads those books. They just know enough about it to look smart at parties.

Equivocations:

1) There are way too many books to be read to spend one’s life slow reading each book you pick up.

2) How many times have you devoured a book, then gone back for the express purpose of picking up details you know you missed the first time because you were so engaged with the story?²

It’s a remake of a 1950s movie and there is a stage play, so you don’t have to torture yourself with this one. ↩
Movie example: Watching Eyes Wide Shut as a single person is an entirely different experience watching it as a married person. ↩

Rook Takes Queen

November 6, 2016November 7, 2016Moriah

So I dug an old manuscript out wondering how/if I should rehab it. I wrote it so long ago, head-hopping was still acceptable, although on its way out. It’s 84,000 words. And there are no f-bombs. (IKR?!) The thing about headhopping, at least for me, is that I could tell a story in so many fewer words with it.

This story has a story.

Before this story’s book began, I’d written a massive under-the-bed novel (whose only remaining copy is in the hands of Tina McClelland Fontana, where it needs to remain). You know, the training novel we all write and then stick it under the bed to hide forever. Then I wrote what is now (massively rehabbed) Paso Doble (it has a story too), for Harlequin. After that, I wrote the first iteration (of four) of what is now Bryce and Giselle’s story.

Then, in 1993, I saw The Fugitive with Tommy Lee Jones about 22 times in the theater (I have no idea how many times I saw it, but it was MANY!). I caught a serious crush (on the actor? the character? who knows?) and I was shipping his character with the nurse (Julianne Moore) with whom he traded all of three(?) lines. (Romance novelist to the core, people, with a slavish devotion to May-December ones.)

That book got me 1) an almost-contract and 2) a literary agent.

This is how a contract becomes an almost, and it was the second time something freaky had happened on the way to getting published (Paso Doble was the first).

I got a call one evening from an editor with Harlequin. This is heart-attack-inducing, folks. She said she loved the book. She loved my voice. And then she said, and I quote, “I bought a book similar to this last month. Yours is much better. But I can’t sell it to my editorial board.”

The ego strokes were nice. I guess.

The literary agent was an interesting experience I will not relate, but she didn’t sell it either.

With 23 years between it and now, I read it, wondering if I could rehab it. After all, Bryce & Giselle, Paso Doble, and Black Jack didn’t turn out too shabbily and I had had no intention of rehabbing those. I had no idea how I’d feel about it, but Jack was the one who started me on this self-pub journey because I’d re-read it after so many years and realized it was good. He broke my heart.

You know what? The TLJ/JM book was pretty good. For back in the day, for the line I wrote it, it was really good. It’s a throwback cliché today, but not too shabby, especially for an early-career book. I wouldn’t be embarrassed now if it had gotten published way back then. And now I’d be tempted to release it as a novelty, an extra on the website, as retro/vintage/early Moriah (hello, Morning in Bed), but the problem isn’t the headhopping or lack of f-bomb. The problem is I’ve cannibalized this book so much it’s got more Swiss than cheese. Anybody who’s read my books will know exactly where and how I used which theme, marker, motif, and zinger.¹

It was a nice, comfortable, not-embarrassing trip down memory lane and now it’s time for it to go into the permanent archive.

Good night, Rook. Good night, Frankie.

I dunno. Maybe I should throw it up on my website in all its Courier-New, double-spaced glory. ↩

Paint the corners

August 16, 2016November 7, 2016Moriah

Cm45YzwUMAAYRcf My 10-year-old XY TD can’t wait to see Pitch. He wants to watch it because it’s something that’s never been done before, a woman pitching in MLB.¹ He doesn’t see a girl. He sees himself. In her. The underdog²,³ misunderstood, not wanted or liked, basically alone with too few allies, too different to have as smooth a ride through malehood as his peers.

Or, as Dude pointed out to me last night because we’re both kind of fascinated with XY’s reaction to the series (whereas 13-year-old XX is so not) (she already knows she’s a badass), a 17-year-old girl struck out both Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game and a woman hasn’t been in the MLB since. ↩
“A girl will never be able to throw hard enough to compete with boys. It’s biology and we can’t change that.” My dad told me a girl would never be able to throw a curve ball because their elbows are constructed differently from a boy’s. I don’t know if that’s true. I’m not interested enough to find out. But I was kind of shocked to hear it from someone else. ↩
I introduced him to Rocky last year. He’s now a devoted disciple of underdog movies. He gets it from his mom. ↩

What are you doing RIGHT NOW?

July 22, 2016July 22, 2016Moriah

Stop.

What are you doing right now? Right this very minute.

Stop for a couple of minutes and answer that question.

That’s all it takes. Just stop. Look around. Are you where you wanted to be at this time of TODAY? Are you past that? Did you get sidetracked? Are you focused? Are you floundering, confused, overwhelmed? Are you hungry or thirsty? Is your brain tired? Do you need a nap? Are you cooking with gas?

What are you doing right now?

Answer the question.

bullet journals
productivity apps
to-do lists
habit trackers
Pomodoro
time tracking
GSD (Getting Stuff Done)
etc
etc
etc

I have failed or I flail at any or all of these. To-do lists and GSD works the most consistently, but some days that’s not saying much.

Some of my Twitter friends and I are productivity enthusiasts, which is to say, we try. And flail. Sometimes fail. We run through methods to see what we like, what we don’t like, what will work provided we work it, what won’t work or what we won’t work.

Mostly we do it for the stationery.

Not really. All we really want to do is get our stuff done so we can do other things that make us happy. That’s all any of us (productivity enthusiasts or not) really want.

That’s what we tell ourselves anyway.

My main method of wrangling my productivity or lack thereof is a combination to-do list, a dun-did list, and mind-mapping with a splash of GSD. (Bullet journaling is beyond my comprehension.) I’m not always faithful about this. But!

I have several problems, three of which are:

a) I’m addicted to procrastination (which is a form of thrill-seeking)
b) I’m only able to focus on one thing at a time and I lose time like crazy, and
c) I’m terrified of getting everything done. What would I do then?

But I ran across this: WHAT ARE YOU DOING RIGHT NOW? I don’t know where. I meant to make a note so I could link back to the article. But it only built on an idea I had when I heard the local college’s clocktower chime.

I have alarms on my phone set for 9a, 11a, 3p, 7p, and 9p and I use distinctive ringtone(s)*.

This one thing, more than anything I have tried thus far, has managed to make me more aware of my daily pace. Even if I don’t write in my journal, even if I don’t have a to-do list, even if I don’t have a dun-did list, when I hear my distinctive ringtones, I know exactly what time it is and I can make a mental note of where I am in my day and what I still need to do.

I don’t wander around so aimlessly now if I’ve hit the wall.

*But here’s the thing: When I set up my alarms, I knew I had to select my alarms very carefully. The ringtone couldn’t be something I already like because I’d ruin the song for myself. It couldn’t be funereal or serious. It couldn’t be too engaging, e.g., too peppy or with lyrics. It couldn’t be something one hears here and there throughout the course of one’s life.

As I already had alarms set for 11, 3, and 7, and I needed to distinguish these somehow, I needed two so I could differentiate.

And so I leave you with these and two questions:

What are you doing right now?

What’s your most effective productivity mechanism(s)?

“The Entertainer” by Scott Joplin [sc_embed_player fileurl=”http://moriahjovan.com/talesofdunham/music/ScottJoplin_TheEntertainer.mp3″]
“Maple Leaf Rag” by Scott Joplin [sc_embed_player fileurl=”http://moriahjovan.com/talesofdunham/music/ScottJoplin_MapleLeafRag.mp3″]